The new buttonless iPod Shuffle, which moves all the controls onto the headphone cord, is taken to task in this article:The new iPod shuffle: Button, button, who's got the button?Now, I'm a recent purchaser of the previous Shuffle model, and intuitively I prefer the Play/Pause/Forward/Back/Up/Down controls of that previous model. But I like to take contrarian positions sometimes too, so let me

These days, there are as many styles of documentation as there are of programming. Structured docs (waterfall model), topic-based writing (object-oriented development), less formal styles based around wikis (agile coding). Another one that I haven't seen given a name, is what I think of as comic-based communication.If you grew up with comic books, fingers poised next to "continued on 3rd page",

This post is about a PL/SQL feature that doesn't get enough respect, "invoker's rights".First off, what's its real name? Depending on the source, you'll see the feature name spelled "invoker's rights", "invokers' rights", or "invoker rights". That makes a difference -- you'll get different results in Google depending on what combination of singular, plural, and possessive you use. And to be

You've probably heard both sides of this argument: throw hardware at performance problems, no no, improve the code. Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror comes down on the "more hardware" side in this post:Coding Horror: Hardware is Cheap, Programmers are ExpensiveUsually I agree with Jeff, but I